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PHP help getting started

ok people, i am trying to learn as much web design coding as possible and in 6 months have learnt HTML and css and a little Javascript.

My mate suggested PHP as the next step, and i purchased a great book on it. however the book talks more about it as a programming language and doesnt give as much help as to how to incorporate it into building a website.

i basically am looking for a great tutorial or website that will take me through the 'first steps' of designing a page in PHP.

To get aquainted with PHP it's useful to think of a little project you want to realize in PHP. That will give you something to focus on and apply what you've read in manuals/tutorials directly to a real-world-problem. Probably a guestbook or a feedback form serve as good beginner projects.

And your book is quite right; PHP is about programming. You don't really "design" a page in PHP, you rather design it like you do a normal HTML page, and only at specific sections of that page you insert small PHP parts, which help with producing the desired HTML output.
For instance, you could have a <div> with a guestbooks's entry date in it. With PHP, you write a script that puts out a number of <div>s ordered by the date within. Just as an example.